Archive for September, 2012

This summer, openSUSE had a great experience for the fifth time participating in the Summer of Code. While working on the list of ideas for GSoC projects, we decided to encourage students to apply not only for openSUSE-specific projects, but also for projects that would be useful to our upstreams and to other distributions. We love working with other organizations, and that is why we always try to push for more collaboration.

Nine of our students successfully completed their projects, and weâ€™d like to share what theyâ€™ve done. (more…)

This week Alan Clark announced to the openSUSE Board that he is stepping down from his position as Board Chair. His duties in SUSE keep him increasingly busy and SUSE has decided, after almost two years, the time has come for someone else to take on his role.

So, after thinking about what skills are most relevant for the openSUSE Board right now and who would fit in best, SUSE managers Michael Miller (Marketing and Product Management) and Ralf Flaxa (Engineering) have announced at the openSUSE Summit opening that they brought in former GNOME Foundation Chairman Vincent Untz to take on the role as chair. The Board is very pleased having someone with the skills and experience of Vincent on board. (more…)

Our public rsync server ‘rsync.opensuse.org’ will be not available on Monday, 2012-09-17, starting 11:00 local time (CEST) which is 17th of September, 09:00 UTC. The downtime is expected to last for three hours.

openSUSE Education team once again presents Li-f-e (Linux for Education) built on hot new openSUSE 12.2 including all the post release updates. As always this edition of Li-f-e comes bundled with a lot of softwares useful for students, teachers, as well as IT admins of educational institutions. Apart from stable versions of KDE and Gnome, Cinnamon is also available. Sugar desktop suite makes a comeback thanks to the work of Xin Wang packaging it. Li-f-e also give full multimedia experience right out of the box without having to install anything extra. The live installable DVD iso stands at 3.3G as an incredible array of softwares from open source world are available on it, we have not just bundled them in, but have tried to integrate it with the distribution to give everything a seamless feel.

KIWI-LTSP brings Li-f-e a very easy to setup LTSP server for PXE booting thin-clients/PC/laptop over the network with many new features and improvements. It can be deployed at schools, homes or even offices. Epoptes lab administration tool makes its debut replacing italc, epoptes allows control of every aspect of the clients, such as: lock/unlock screen, full remote control, messaging, broadcasting display, reboot/shutdown etc.

As this edition is based on openSUSE 12.2, all the official 12.2 updates, repositories from build service and packman can be used to install additional softwares and keep it up to date.

Minimum hardware requirement is 1GB of RAM and 15GB free disk space. Installation from USB stick will take about 40 minutes to complete, from a DVD it takes much longer. Check this howto for creating live USB stick on vfat partition or other GUI and terminal ways.

The openSUSE Conference is coming!

The Call for Papers is closed and the sessions for this awesome four-plus-one event are decided upon and scheduled. It is time to grab a pen and paper, look at the exciting conference schedule here and start making a little plan of what sessions to attend! To help you, we present a short selection of sessions and speakers below! (click here for this article in Cz)

Dear users, developers, and Geekos around the world – openSUSE 12.2 is ready for you! Two months of extra stabilization work have resulted into a stellar release, chock-full of goodies, yet stable as you all like it.

The latest release of the world’s most powerful and flexible Linux Distribution brings you speed-ups across the board with a faster storage layer in Linux 3.4 and accelerated functions in glibc and Qt, giving a more fluid and responsive desktop. The infrastructure below openSUSE has evolved, bringing in mature new technologies like GRUB2 and Plymouth and the first steps in the direction of a revised and simplified UNIX file system hierarchy. Users will also notice the added polish to existing features bringing an improved user experience all over. The novel Btrfs file system comes with improved error handling and recovery tools, GNOME 3.4, developing rapidly, brings smooth scrolling to all applications and features a reworked System Settings and Contacts manager while XFCE has an enhanced application finder. (more…)

openSUSE 12.2 is the second openSUSE release to include GNOME 3. GNOME 3.4 continues the rapid pace of evolution and consolidation set by GNOME 3.2 on openSUSE 12.1. This article is a sneak peek of what will be released tomorrow, the 5th of September!

openSUSE comes with the 4.8 series of the KDE workspaces, applications and platform. This release, as you can read in the announcements is mostly focused on improving the user experience.

Starting up

Â Booting up openSUSE, you notice the nice new splash screen as well as the short boot times, courtesy of Plymouth and an improved systemd. But you’ll notice speed everywhere: this openSUSE release ships with Linux 3.4.6, a kernel release with a nice number of improvements to the storage layer. Moreover, openSUSE is build with GCC 4.7 and glibc 2.15, bringing speedups all over the system. You’ll notice this especially in the performance of low-level tools like the command line and GUI versions of zypper, our package manager. Especially relevant for the desktop is the inclusion of Qt 4.8.1 which makes your applications noticeably more responsive. The version of KWin part of KDE 4.8 comes with its own share of optimizations, with much more efficient painting. In short, boot up in openSUSE 12.2 and feel the speed!(more…)